I used the last of my steri-wipes to get his blood off my hands.
Day 63: It'll All End in Tears
"France thanks you for the service you have rendered her, monsieur." I figured the Blanc general was speaking more for the benefit of the news weasels on the other side of the mirrorwall than he was for me, but I nodded my head with what I hoped looked like sagacity. "Bringing the beast Abalain to justice will show the world the true face that lies behind the mask of the Commune de Paris."
I tried to be blasé about it. But looking at this guy, I couldn't help but wonder about the arithmetic of Paree: how in the world did you add up the folks on my street, the ones I played baseball with, and the ones who sold me bread and sausage and wine – and end up with assholes like Abalain or this prat? What variable in the goddamn equation made people stop thinking and let their emotions do all the heavy lifting?
I'd hoped to feel cleansed at having done for Abalain, but I didn't.
"Good for you," I said, getting to my feet. "I'd love to stay and watch, but I have to go home now. I'm going to take a forty-eighthour shower, and then I'm going to sleep for a week."
"I believe the people from your embassy want to talk to you, Monsieur Rosen," the general said warily.
"Have them call my service," I said. That's me: Mister How to Make Friends and Influence People.
"The photographers say they're not finished yet."
That's just great, I thought. Is there anybody in this city who isn't working an angle?
Sissy hadn't been working anything except maybe her hormones. I'd been able to store her carefully in the back of my mind while working up my escape plan. But she was clamoring to get out of my head now. Being away from the Commune didn't make me any more free than if I'd still been Abalain's pet ferret: I still had to face up to the fact that she was gone. How was I going to explain this to my aunt?
The door behind me slammed open.
"Lee!"
I turned around so fast I fell over. That's my story, anyway, and I'm sticking to it. Then she was down on the carpet with me and hugging me and crying and I guess I got kind of sloppy too. But I swear the first words out of my mouth were: "Where the fuck have you been?"
She slapped me, lightly. "I worried about you too."
"Jesus," I said, sitting up. "I was convinced you were – " I couldn't say it, not now. It seemed it could still happen; I might be imagining this. "What happened to you? How did you get away?"
"It was Eddie," she said.
"Not true, Lee." Eddie flowed into the room, graceful in spite of his bulk. "She's the one who did it. I just got her back across the lines."
"Will you two stop negotiating credits and just tell me what happened?"
"When they separated us when the bus stopped I was so scared," Sissy said. "Everyone was scared. But then I thought about what you'd said. You said not to worry. And you always looked after me, Lee." She smiled, and even though her eyes looked dead with fatigue I still felt better for seeing that. "I figured you knew what you were talking about. So I didn't worry. Instead, I tried to guess what you'd do, and I decided that you'd watch and wait for a chance to do something."
I looked at Sissy more closely. It wasn't just fatigue I was seeing in her eyes. There was something else, something sort of calm and understanding. This wasn't the girl I'd lost back at the Dialtone. Of course, being kidnapped can do that to a person.
"So I'm watching what happens, and what happens is that everybody's so scared that they all just stand there gibbering and crying all over one another," she said. "They must have been doing that all along, but I never noticed it. Until I sat back and made myself look. We were all just crying like babies. And the guards must have noticed too, because when I looked I saw that they weren't really paying any attention to us. They were all watching the guys being rounded up." We were the ones making the fuss, I remembered. Some of us, anyway. Some of us were still trying to think of a way of finessing ourselves out of that jam.
"So it was really pretty simple." Sissy smiled artlessly, and for a moment she was my kid cousin again. "I just kind of shuffled my feet and moved back without trying to move too much. And when I was at the back of the crowd I just sort of slipped out of it. It was dark and nobody noticed me. But you know, I don't think they were all that smart, Lee. We just let ourselves think they were 'cause we were all so scared. As soon as I started trying to think like you do, it was easy to get away." She hugged me fiercely. "I saw you trying to distract their attention from me, Lee." Now she was crying again. "What you did for me – I couldn't have done that for you." She dug her face into my shoulder and sobbed, and I felt like the stupidest idiot outside of a corporate boardroom. I had out-clevered myself into eight weeks or more of slavery, and she was smart enough to just walk away – and she was giving me the credit?
"And that's when Eddie saved me."
"I followed the bus," Eddie said with a shrug. "Probably not the smartest thing in the world, but hey. I should have seen it coming, and I didn't. I felt responsible, you know?" I knew. "Soon as I saw you all being off-loaded and sorted I figured I was screwed, and I was making my way back to the lines when I come across Sissy here. And damned if she didn't want to take me back and try to spring you. Took me ten minutes to persuade her we'd only get ourselves killed."
"You can always trust Fat Eddie," I said. "He knows three ways around every angle there is. Listening to him definitely saved your life." I decided then that I was never going to tell Sissy the full story of my service to the Commune. Even if it seemed that the Sissy who was smiling at me now wasn't the same kid who'd wanted to see the sights back in the great Before.
"She could have gone home, you know," Fat Eddie said. "Her mom sure as hell wanted her to. Instead, we've spent the last eight weeks nagging the shit out of anybody who'd listen, trying to find you. And now we have."
"And now I want a shower," I said. "I want some clean clothes."
"I want to go back to the Dialtone and finish my drink," Sissy said.
I stared at her. "You're joking, right?"
"Oh, you can shower and change first, if you want." She stood up, then grabbed my hands and pulled me to my feet. "Come on, Lee. It's a glorious time to be in Paree."
Paree – where snipers lurked in the high windows and unwashed thugs stared blindly at castrated video lottery terminals. Paree, where, on the pavé before a rusting Citroën, I had decided to die. The fatal anguish surged through me — and
out.
I was a dead man, dead many times over in the past eight weeks, and yet, miraculously,
alive.
Alive, in Gay Paree, where famed Dialtone yet stood, where the bartender would mix me a Manhattan and my cousin Sissy would dance while I watched approvingly from a side table, chewing on my work problems and swapping ironic glances with Fat Eddie.
I extended an arm and Sissy took it at the elbow. Fat Eddie shouldered us a path through the crowd, over the epoxy cobblestones, and down the boulevard toward the Dialtone.
Arabesques of Eldritch Weirdness #8
Je
rey Ford
Inky night of live burial, gasping for dirt reeking with zombie blood wept from the eyes of a vampire bat into a flask in the hand of Doctor Imperius Fragturd, lab-coat clad, psychotic ex-Nobel laureate, who has his once-beloved wife encased in a block of ice in a walk-in freezer of his own brilliant design and who has gone off his rocker with surrogate lust for the innocent hips of Wendy Hartshine, cheerleader and glee club captain, IQ 40, the tasty piece of trim in the broken-down Thunderbird convertible on the side of the road outside the dilapidated mansion that, back in the monster-ridden days of yore, before radio and prohibition, was the site of the final battle, ending in a mutual expiration, of The Cat Faced Freak and The Stalking Brain Eater, who brutally ate corpus callosum with little remorse and less grace like an ordinary man carrying the transplanted soul of a lamprey that made the arcing electrical leap at the insistence of a thunderstorm's harnessed energy, and always too much radiation, way too much frigging radiation, causing ants to mutate into geniuses, themselves, so that all they want to do is crawl in the ears of sleeping children and burrow through their brains to nourish their aching, pinprick imaginations and in the process spark dreams of a shadow-clad figure skulking through alleys wielding a straight razor that once shaved the beard of the poor Lazarus, down but not out, though showing bone, whose rotting, yellow-nailed hands are clawing up through the soft earth over in the cemetery, birthing himself in order to once again seek the ancient mysteries of Hermes Trismegistus, the Egyptian adept with all the answers to all the questions, like how the town soda jerk, Jed Bleener, Wendy's wide-eyed, handsome beau, is going to save her screeching sweater meat from the clutches of Fragturd before he experiments on her flesh, turning it sour green and wrinkled in the act of implanting his own desire into her sacred, as yet undefiled, temple of God with a special formula of demon spittle, alien gaze, and ape sweat, making her love him the way he loves him, the way the Devil of insidious Science and all that is unknown, Heathen, Nazi, and anti-Christian insists that he do for the sake of the plot and the proliferation of pulp.
The Seven-Day Itch
